“Love and Death is [Allen’s] most ambitious experiment with the comic possibilities of film…done with such care, love and lunacy.”
—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“Tolstoy by way of Bob Hope, with enough room for Mozart and Prokofiev…the beauty of Ghislain Cloquet’s cinematography is part of the joke.”
—Fernando F. Croce, Cinepassion

Woody Allen takes on the monolith of Russian literature—with a bit of Ingmar Bergman thrown in for good measure—with Love and Death (1975), a deadpan costume epic set against the sweeping backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. Allen plays Boris, a philosophical coward who becomes an inadvertent war hero and then a potential assassin thanks to the encouragement of his mad(cap) wife, Sonja (the fab Diane Keaton). Shot by the great cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet (Tess, Au Hasard Balthazar).